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lemaxon Show HN: I built a site that lets users find playlists by songs they contain

I use 1001 tracklists for this - you can search by track and it will surface DJ sets where the song was played.

https://www.1001tracklists.com/

lemaxon Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

Can someone explain what either of these two companies are actually selling, beyond the cryptic marketing messaging on their respective websites?

Someone in this thread indicated that Citrix was the original developer of Microsoft Remote Desktop, and later licensed it to Microsoft. All Citrix's website seems to offer is "One digital workspace platform to empower secure hybrid work".

And what's the deal with Tibco?

lemaxon Shipping Multi-Tenant SaaS Using Postgres Row-Level Security

In my experience we've looked toward this kind of solution in a large legacy single-tenant application that wants to go multi tenant with more safety guarantees.

lemaxon Shipping Multi-Tenant SaaS Using Postgres Row-Level Security

It's possible to implement this without creating new connections to the database for each request by using SET LOCAL and wrapping every query in a transaction. Instead of applying RLS based on the current user, you apply RLS based on the parameter value you set at the beginning of the transaction. You can set this parameter value based on the user session in your application.

Your RLS policy looks as follows: CREATE POLICY tenant_${tableName}_isolation_policy ON "${tableName}" USING ("tenant_id" = current_setting('app.current_tenant');

Your queries look something like this: BEGIN TRANSACTION SET LOCAL app.current_tenant = '${tenant}'; SELECT * from some_table END TRANSACTION;

You can even initialize your writes with a `tenant_id` column defaulted to your `current_setting('app.current_tenant')`

lemaxon How the Russia-Ukraine War Threatens the Dollar’s Dominance

https://archive.ph/pAkDt

lemaxon 58% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck – including 30% earning $250k

Most people are notoriously bad at saving money. It's fairly well known phenomena that large lottery winners and inheritance recipients also tend to go bankrupt (something like 1/3?). I guess even at the smaller scale - even making the money yourself - it doesn't matter. Once you size up your lifestyle and get acclimated it's very hard to reduce.

lemaxon Wearing flashy/status clothes makes people less likely to cooperate with you

In the fashion buying world, high end brands will force stockists to buy a certain number of units of the logo crap (tees etc) in order to get units of the more desirable/unique seasonal pieces. FWIW, as someone who leans toward a lot of high end, most of the work of shopping is wading through that junk.

lemaxon Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

China can easily lift its zero-covid policies whenever it wants, but the global supply chain disruption will reverberate long after it does so. Hasn't zero covid just pushed up prices on Chinese goods and services? I question whether this is a concerted, smarter strategy with a longer term outlook than the media likes to estimate -- China pivots this draconian strategy whenever it wants, and the world just returns to leveraging them at higher prices.

lemaxon Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

This applies to nearly any team, you ideally always want to have 2+ people at similar levels competing for the promotion.

lemaxon Web scraping via JavaScript runtime heap snapshots

I've used a similar technique on some web pages that get returned from the server with an in-tact redux state object just sitting in a <script> tag. Instead of parsing the HTML, I just pull out the state object. Super

lemaxon Ask HN: Has anyone successfully renegotiated an AWS non-compete?

I always clarify scope on non-competes. Even if you can get an email back from an HR person clarifying scope, that should be sufficient. They will take it to legal and legal will come back with what they can do. For example, in the last non-compete I signed, it was phrased as something like "Company's business". I clarified that "company's business is X", giving X in my own words.

lemaxon Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe won't let writers leave until they are finished

This is a great concept. I've often wished I could just pay someone to call me and make me get out of bed when my sleep schedule falls off the charts. Even if people can't physically force you to do something, I think most of us are intrinsically motivated to show up for people when they expect it, especially if we develop respect for them. This is how managers get people to get things done, even when it's hard to hold them to account or pay isn't tied to particular deliverables.

lemaxon Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

Noise is also a big part of certain cultures/contexts though. Blanket rules around noise levels could be unfair if they don't provide a venue for noisey folks somewhere. In Brooklyn, for example, there are neighborhoods and entire buildings that revolve around loudness, inhabited by musicians, artists, and boisterous young people who stay up all hours. For example, in the McKibbin lofts in Bushwick, Brooklyn, like many buildings in the area, people are implicitly party to a social contract of accepting noise levels unacceptable to most people. If noise becomes more regulated, room must be kept for the nuances and exceptions that are culturally significant to smaller communities within larger cities. A lot of important cultural production comes out of these spaces.

lemaxon Why the Black MacBook Cost More

When I was in middle school a friend gave me a black macbook that she said no one in her house used anymore after my iBook g4 was on its final leg. It was like, the nicest thing ever and I used the hell out of that thing. I was in near disbelief the day she came into school and pulled it out of her backpack, the fact that it was a black macbook.

lemaxon I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

Doesn't dollar cost averaging avoid the whole issue of timing the market? Index investing feels fairly safe to me with DCA if you can stick with it.

lemaxon What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Book Summary

I feel no shame sifting through non-fiction books. There is nothing wrong with not reading cover to cover. I tend to skip chapters or long anecdotes for concepts I have already absorbed, and I sometimes also apply speed reading principles (usually the first and last sentence of a paragraph are most significant, and the body of the paragraph provides supporting evidence).

We don't owe any book our time. I am very selective about what I choose to expose myself to, and I gravitate toward only novel information. I'll slow down when I don't understand something, and speed up 5x or entirely skip the fluff/fodder or non-new info.

lemaxon Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

Yes, soybean oil is marketed as vegetable oil, e.g. Crisco vegetable oil is soybean based.

lemaxon Works in Progress has joined Stripe

They also acquired Indiehackers a few years ago, I think this is part of a wider content marketing / brand halo effort.

lemaxon Worldle

Fun fact, Google Earth had its coordinates defaulted to an apartment complex in Lawrence, Kansas, apparently the childhood home of one of the engineers, but also roughly the center of the United States.

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/dec/21/lawrence_pinpointe...

lemaxon The 4-day week is flawed – workers still want it

Why is this premise of this 40 hours compressed into 4 days? To me, reduced hours means making more of the time you actually spend working. 40-50 work weeks involve a lot of thumb twiddling and doing nothing in between the impactful stuff.

lemaxon Show HN: Magistrate – Plaintext legal contracts for developers

The domination of Word over contract negotiations seems crazy from my engineer's point of view. Just to get a contract through with a few changes, we go through Word diffs, manual review, and these crazy confusing to parse tracked changes. And then when everything is said and done, the lawyers produce a "final PDF" and we have to run another comparison in Acrobat.

It's always seemed to me that git is the answer, but yeah, you'd need to prevail over the serious network effects of Word, deal with formatting (provision numbering, definitions, etc), and provide ways for lawyers to ignore the history or start from a clean "accept everything" slate at any phase of the negotiation. Not to mention all the back and forth happening over email in between drafts that can sometimes be valuable or even legally useful later on.

lemaxon Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

It feels eerie that these trillions of parameters and exabyte sized training sets will come from harvested user data. 17 years of user activity all culminating into some.. supercomputer? I wonder how comments I wrote when I, and all the other people from my generation, were like 14 and using FB will feed into this and sort of be immortalized in this strange way.

lemaxon FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.

lemaxon Apple Accelerates Work on Car Project, Aiming for Autonomous Vehicle by 2025

Archived version of the article https://archive.md/xxMJ8

lemaxon How I got wealthy without working too hard

Oh, I see. this wouldn't apply to a US/Canada citizen, since the US taxes worldwide income.

lemaxon How I got wealthy without working too hard

Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada

Could you elaborate on this or provide a source? Curious because I'm in the US in tech with a canadian citizenship.

lemaxon It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

Most companies like Airbnb, Turo, Boatsetter (airbnb for boats) offer some insurance they negotiate with an underwriter like Geico. Getting this sort of insurance individually is much more costly or next to impossible, which is why we don't see people short-term renting expensive assets to each other on Craigslist. I imagine negotiating the ability to dole out these sorts of policies at scale with Lloyd's of London or GEICO is fairly arduous, but it seems like one of more key pieces for these companies to successfully get off the ground to me.

lemaxon Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

Assuming you have no experience and few connections, my advice would be to take your time, build up a resume, and get into a large city quickly. Freelance a few projects or build some personal projects that have an element of commercial relevance. If you don't have freelance projects to work on (e.g. help someone get a website up, write a backend for someone's random thing that you met on a craigslist), then make some things up and be forward to hiring managers, "I just built this to test out xyz framework/programming language and learn a bit more".

Move to a big city or apply for a bunch of jobs in a big city. Jobs to target would be marketing/creative agencies companies that don't have a core competency in software. In New York for instance, there are lots of these, and many get hired to do websites or one-off apps for well known clients and have trouble finding and keeping talent. It's not glamorous, but do this for 6 months to a year, study some stuff on the side, and it shouldn't be hard to land a job at a company that has more of a focus on engineering, can teach you more, and pay better.

lemaxon Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

React and React Native are separate tools, and they don't play with each other. You actually need to build two separate apps and you don't get much of any re-use. For example, you can't use Material UI for React in React Native, and you can't build a React component library and just pull it into React Native.

So if you want a fully cross platform React experience, you need React Native from the get-go and to compile it for web when you want web.

lemaxon Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

Why not just move to a dense city or downtown? How can a random developer-planned concrete mixed use fortress possibly achieve the nature of a city? A street in a city is a market. People compete to offer the best goods/services/experiences based on the what the local people want and this organically grows into something interesting. If one person plans it all out from the get-go it kind of loses the sheen of any level of culture/unpredictability that makes living in this setting appealing. This feels like a repackaging of those McMansion neighborhoods in a cute urban millenial flavor.